willowisp | (no subject)

I really meant to post last night, but LJ was having problems with my password.

Although I've been typing "London" in my entries up until now, we're actually spending the bulk of our visit in Nottingham (yes, that Nottingham).

erish has to work so we're on our own in the daytime, but we've spent the evenings with her. There's an origami conference in Nottingham University this weekend which we're attending, then we'll spend one day in London before coming home.

We spent yesterday wandering around Nottingham Centre. We visited a clothing and textile museum which interspersed themed exhibits (socks through the centuries and such) with dioramas of sitting rooms from various eras. The clothes were real, and almost all of them came with histories and the names of the people who wore them. We also visited Nottingham Castle. Sadly the original was destroyed in/after the Civil War, so what we were really seeing was a very large manor house built on the original site. For both Andy and me the best exhibit was one of glass sea creatures hand-made in the late 1800s. They looked more like flash-frozen specimens than glass.

Today we went to Sherwood Forest. I was expecting something... denser, I guess. The central tree, rumored to be the one around which Robin and his men used as a meeting point, is huge. The canopy is 92 feet and the waist is 33 feet or so. Today we remembered to bring the camera like good little tourists, so I have some pictures. We went back to the castle to buy a paperweight and get pictures of the glass exhibit and the flowers around the castle. I've now gotten most of the stuff people requested from England; the few remaining things we'll get once we're back in London.

Tomorrow we're hoping to visit "The Robin Hood Experience", which can be found on Maid Marion Way. Andy wants to check out some bookstores and a comic shop which had some Gaiman stuff we can't get in the states. Then in the evening we'll be going to the unofficial beginning of the conference, which technically starts on Saturday. Andy figures we'll be out of jet lag mode on oh, say, Tuesday.